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Ecliptic Flight (Deception Fleet Book 5)
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Ecliptic Flight
Deception Fleet Book Five
Daniel Gibbs
Steve Rzasa
Contents
Starchart - Sagittarius/Orion Arms
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
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Ecliptic Flight by Daniel Gibbs
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Gibbs
Visit Daniel Gibbs website at
www.danielgibbsauthor.com
Cover by Jeff Brown Graphics—www.jeffbrowngraphics.com
Additional Illustrations by Joel Steudler—www.joelsteudler.com
This book is a work of fiction, the characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permissions please contact [email protected].
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Battlegroup Z
Book 1 - Weapons Free
Book 2 - Hostile Spike
Book 3 - Sol Strike
Book 4 - Bandits Engaged
Book 5 - Iron Hand
Book 6 - Final Flight
Echoes of War
Book 1 - Fight the Good Fight
Book 2 - Strong and Courageous
Book 3 - So Fight I
Book 4 - Gates of Hell
Book 5 - Keep the Faith
Book 6 - Run the Gauntlet
Book 7 - Finish the Fight
Breach of Faith
(With Gary T. Stevens)
Book 1 - Breach of Peace
Book 2 - Breach of Faith
Book 3 - Breach of Duty
Book 4 - Breach of Trust
Deception Fleet
(With Steve Rzasa)
Book 1 - Victory’s Wake
Book 2 - Cold Conflict
Book 3 - Hazards Near
Book 4 - Liberty’s Price
Book 5 - Ecliptic Flight
Book 6 - Collision Vector
Prologue
Freighter Amber Sun
Nandao Star System
League of Sol
3 March 2466
Garrison Cho checked the space-bound traffic around Nandao for orbital crossovers. Nandao’s flight control fed him myriad tracks and coordinates, sending repeated warnings about the fines that would be levied on him if he deviated from his departure route within three hundred thousand kilometers of the planet.
He shook his head. Galt was a rough-and-tumble world, free of most restrictions like those, so he could never get used to how many rules and regulations strangled the majority of galactic citizens. Such was the price of doing business with the League of Sol, he supposed.
It didn’t matter much. His two-hundred-meter-long Tradesman-class merchant vessel, Amber Sun, was loaded to the brim with lithium ore. Garrison wasn’t much for politics, so he didn’t know why the League was so keen on trading with independent worlds like Galt those days—and there were few like Galt that wanted to participate. The Sagittarius Arm Treaty Organization vacuumed up worlds every month, it seemed like, with fewer neutral planets remaining who were just trying to do business. I’m fine with taking League scrip as readily as Coalition credit.
Garrison checked the distances on the next orbit approaching. He got a green light from Nandao’s flight control.
“Ollie, clear those notices out of the comms, will you? They’re jamming up our bandwidth.”
“You’re telling me, Skipper.” Ollie, the comms technician, worked with his console like a man trying to replace the entire operating board in the middle of a system-wide reboot. “We’ll be lucky if we can get outbound nav coordinate updates at the rate they keep flooding us with stay-in-your-lane notes. Clearly, you’re not paying me enough for these headaches.”
“Then bug me for a raise after we get back to Galt and take payment from our buyers for the ore. I don’t have enough money.”
From the back of the bridge, Annette laughed. She turned in her chair at the sensor station. “If he’s getting a raise, I get one, too, in honor of my many years spent putting up with his whining.”
“Allah, preserve my sanity,” Garrison muttered.
“Don’t ask him, or he might side with your underworked—underpaid—shipmates,” Annette warned.
“Hear, hear,” Ollie agreed.
Garrison shook his head but chuckled. They were a good pair, better than most of the crew he’d rounded up in the past few years. No mistake, Ryan had the engine techs working in the best shape possible after eight months of near-constant haranguing, and Garrison was more than happy to split the profits into fair shares among the eleven people keeping Amber Sun not only running, but in the black. Even if he had to trade with the crazed Leaguers to do so.
Whatever. Garrison snorted at his own attitude. As long as he gave zakat to the charities Father approved, he could do what he liked with their ship and make the family proud.
His console’s screens blinked then froze. Static washed across them.
Garrison frowned. “Didn’t Ryan replace the data buffer on Console One a week ago?”
“Shit!” Ollie pulled the earphones from his head. A keening wail echoed out of them. “That’s a jammer, Skipper.”
“From where? Nandao control?” Even as he asked, Garrison knew the traffic system wouldn’t bother with something that dangerous. They just keep hectoring Amber Sun with demands to shut down and relinquish the helm for navigational override.
“Nothing I can see—hang on.” Annette peered at her screen. “I’ve got two ships coming in fast from the second moon.”
“Second moon? Ragye isn’t settled. Even the quarries are abandoned.” Garrison put Amber Sun onto a new trajectory and increased her acceleration by twenty percent.
That pissed off Nandao control because three more warnings blared across his message board, but at least they couldn’t get hollered at via the comms with the system jammed.
“I know, Skipper, but that doesn’t change where they’re coming from,” Annette argued. “Backtrace shows
they probably originated from the planet proper, shot around the night side, and picked up a gravity boost from the bigger moon, Manjin, before shooting past Ragye. They’re really cooking too. Two minutes until they intercept us.”
“Pirates.” Garrison sighed. An unavoidable risk when traveling risky new cargo routes across lightly policed space. “All right. Try to signal them, Ollie. If you can break through the jamming, offer them eight percent.”
“That’s way too low, but I’ll try.” Ollie made a face. He slid commands around the comms screen. “Their jamming’s pretty weak—not military-grade, that’s for sure, otherwise I’d be screwed. As it is, I’m seeing it clear up already. But eight percent? Really?”
“It’s a negotiation, Ollie, not a—”
“Missile launches!” Annette blurted. “Two incoming! Impact in twenty-five seconds! Those are fighters, Skipper!”
Fighters? Is Nandao trying to shoot us down? And pirates—they wouldn’t try to destroy a potential windfall.
That was what Garrison thought in a half second. He slapped the engine thrust, sending Amber Sun into her best acceleration rate, which was a quarter better than what the Tradesman class was rated when buying a stock freighter. For the second time in his career, he was relieved he hadn’t given as much zakat as Father had demanded.
At the same time, he hit the starboard thrusters in a burst that set the deck plates rattling even harder than when the engines rumbled at their max. A loose plate shimmied beneath Garrison’s terminal. He stomped on it, settling it back into place.
“Countermeasures armed,” Annette reported.
Garrison launched the scatter pods. The tactical display mounted next to his nav console showed three green diamonds spiraling away from Amber Sun. They exploded into glittering clouds of sand grains—simple canisters of plain planetary material available from any coast, but when propelled from a fast-moving starship, they became millions of high-velocity projectiles. Well worth the cost he’d paid to whatever alien species had developed it.
The first missile, a red arrow on the tactical display, hit a cloud head-on and blew up. The second one skirted a sand cloud and suddenly changed course, probably because its drive had suffered damage. It, too, exploded, only a few thousand meters closer than Garrison would have liked. The fighters themselves raced by, whipping onto new vectors no civilian vessel could have managed.
Garrison glanced back at Ollie. “Anything?”
“That’s a big, fat negative.” Ollie glowered at his console. “The jamming’s cleared, though. If you want any other messages to go out, now’s the time—they’re looking for ways to reestablish.”
Garrison glared at the fighters on the tactical display. If they wanted to come after his ship in such a blatant fashion, in League space no less, he would bring attention, all right. “Set me up with an all-channels distress.”
Ollie tapped in commands. “You’re up, Skipper.”
“This is Captain Garrison Cho of the independent freighter Amber Sun, trading between Nandao and Galt. We are under attack by hostile starfighters of unknown ownership. I am requesting aid from League forces or any willing defender. We can compensate those who come to our assistance.”
The sensor console clamored again. “Double spread,” Annette warned. “Four missiles inbound.”
Garrison immediately realized his mistake—his initial trajectory evasion had put him into the crosshairs of the fighters when they came back for their counterattack, and he simply didn’t have the experience to anticipate how a craft moving that fast would react. He’d tussled with pirates in modified freighters, and even with their own fighters. But these…
“Impact in twenty-eight seconds.” Annette’s voice was hollow. “Scatter pods loaded.”
“Everyone to escape pods.” Garrison slapped the launcher for the scatter pods. “And toss the data buoy with whatever we have on them. There’s no way those are pirate fighters. Someone’s targeting us with top-of-the-line gear.”
The sand clouds dispersed, but that time, the missiles skipped around potential threats as if they’d been waiting for the moment. Garrison knew he was out of time, and the worst feeling was knowing he’d let down his crew.
Ollie and Annette scrambled for the bridge’s pod, shouting at Garrison to move. Not a chance. Paradise was waiting for him. He would go willingly into Allah’s welcoming arms if it gave his people the chance to live.
But as the red arrows merged with Amber Sun on the tactical board, Garrison could barely hold on to hope. He closed his eyes as a deafening roar shredded his senses and took his consciousness far away from the searing pain that swept through his body.
The White House Gardens
Lawrence City
Canaan
4 March 2466
President Justin Spencer took advantage of the sunny afternoon to conduct his day’s business outdoors. The garden beyond the Oval Office was blooming, with irises predominant among the walkway plants.
He hadn’t gone completely blue-collar. His crisp formal shirt was unbuttoned at the top, and he’d left his jacket over the office chair, so he imagined he looked less like a gardener and more like an executive who’d gotten bored or exhausted by the week’s tasks and craved a change of pace.
One hundred percent accurate. He grinned as he trimmed dead leaves from a cluster of flowers. It’s much easier to fix problems out here than in there. Not that I’ve completely forgotten them, but the noise gets to be too much.
Spencer had left his tablet propped upright on a nearby bench. He could see the screen’s text, with the lighting adjusted for the outdoors, and periodically paused in his manual labor to skim the next dispatch from the diplomatic corps.
It was on the seventh such glance he spotted General Andrew MacIntosh, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, barreling toward him like a man trying to hurry but avoiding running at all costs.
MacIntosh caught his breath at the bench, bracing himself on a handhold. “Mr. President, this can’t wait. There’s been a terrorist attack on a neutral trader leaving a Leaguer planet.”
Spencer’s eyes widened. “Nothing like getting to the point, Andrew. Let me see.”
MacIntosh shook his head. Spencer frowned and wiped his hands as he stood. He’d expected a full report—preferably on a flat screen since holograms didn’t play nicely in daylight or even a printed sheet. But the general who’d helped lead them through the dark last years of the war with the League of Sol glanced sideways like he was expecting to be tackled.
“I’m relaying it in person for a reason, Mr. President,” MacIntosh explained. “A CDF Intelligence probe based out of New Rostov caught long-range scanner reading of the attack. As soon as the Intelligence unit there viewed the data, they transmitted it directly to us disguised as a stellar phenomenon report that looked like it should be telling us about travel hazards on the League frontier.”
“I don’t follow. Aren’t normal encryption protocols strong enough to resist interception?”
“Yes, sir, but…” MacIntosh scowled. “Sir, the attackers used Phantoms to shoot down a Galter cargo vessel loaded with Leaguer ores.”
Spencer stepped back, his legs jostling the bench. His tablet clattered onto the walkway. Spencer couldn’t care less about potential damage. “That can’t be. The SF-106 isn’t for sale to foreign powers. It’s our frontline mainstay space superiority starfighter and therefore off-limits when it comes to weapons contracts.”
MacIntosh nodded in polite response to what Spencer knew was an info dump, but Spencer couldn’t help it—the former pilot in him snapped out the details because the thought of anyone else flying the Coalition’s best was absurd.
“The data’s conclusive, Mr. President. We’re giving it a more thorough comb, but I don’t doubt it’s true.”
Spencer ran a hand through his hair. “But you’re coming to me in person and normal channels were avoided because what you suspect, I assume, is the worst.”
“That someone i
nside our own government supplied insurgents with our best fighter?” MacIntosh growled. “You’re damned right that’s what I suspect.”
“Then we’d better convene the others.” Spencer rolled down his sleeves and retrieved his tablet from the ground. “Get Ed and Celinda from wherever they are—in person. I don’t care how long it takes. No, wait—I’ll find Ed. You grab Celinda from her office.”
“You got it. And another one we’ll need…”
“You’re probably right.” Spencer brushed past MacIntosh as he strode toward the office. “I’ll contact Colonel Sinclair myself.”
1
Port Nomad
Western Steppes
Canaan
4 March 2466
Jackson Adams’ earliest memories of Port Nomad were day trips Dad took him on. There was always a part to buy or a vendor to pay or goods to retrieve for the house. Mom’s list seemed endless, especially for a six-year-old who was learning to ride a skimmer.
He didn’t find much had changed in more than twenty years. Port Nomad lacked the grandeur of a big city like Canaan, even though it had been settled less than a decade after the capital, but only Mercantile Hall was that old. The rest of the town, laid out in three grids of ten-by-ten streets, always seemed to Jackson like it had been dropped there from low orbit, with more stores than homes.